FIGURE 7.2 Broadacre City (section of scale model) by Frank Lioyd Wright. According to Peter G. Rowe, Broadacre City has all the features of “modern pastoralism” in its use of technological and technocratic means within a clearly defined rural agrarian setting (Rowe,P.G. Making a Middle Landscape. Massachusetts: MIT Press,1991,235;Frank Lloyd Wright,1935.)
7.2.2 AESTHETIC AND UTILITARIAN LANDSCAPE
The Danish landscape scholar Ellen Braae has identified the same kind of tensions associated with modern pastoralism in relation to when Denmark in the 18th century was in the middle of an ecological crisis because of an excessive use of the country’s natural resources. In this context’ Braae uses a distinction between the “aesthetic” and the “utilitarian” to describe the emergent split between sense and sensibility, between science and art, which characterized the 18th century, a period in time marked by dawning industrialization, the advance of science, and the Romantic movement. On the one hand, nature was made an object of scientific studies and industrialization; on the other hand, nature was cultivated as a sensuous phenomenon by the arts (Braae 2011).
According to Braae, this split has subsequently created the basis for a gap between the realities in our everyday landscapes and the ideals, which has continued to influence landscape architecture. Although most of our natural environment has been subjected to a utilitarian approach and an industrial style cultivation with emphasis on optimization and maximization, landscape architecture, to a large extent, has rested on landscape as an aesthetic category characterized by a contemplative relationship to The Garden and the Machine
7.3 LANDSCAPE AS INFRASTRUCTURE AND THE GARDEN AS MACHINE
Seen in relation to the discussion in Section 7.2, one might wonder whether the current discourses on landscape urbanism and ecological urbanism and the promotion of landscape as infrastructure is just another and perhaps more sophisticated chapter in the history of modern pastoralism? The combination of the terms ecology and urbanism certainly evoke the kind of harmony between man and nature that can be associated with the pastoral ideal, and the idea of landscape as infrastructure implies some kind of utilitarian and technological approach to the natural environment. However, landscape as infrastructure might as well involve the kinds of new interpretation of the aesthetic and the utilitarian that Braae calls for. Whether the current promotion of landscape as infrastructure is an extension or a rejection of modern pastoralism seems an interesting and important question given the fact that the promotion of landscape as infrastructure is often linked to the idea of revealing and solving environmental problems caused by a predominantly utilitarian and technological approach to the natural environment.
7.3.1 LANDSCAPE AS INFRASTRUCTURE
According to Canadian landscape scholar Pierre Belanger, who has contributed to the current discourses on landscape urbanism and ecological urbanism, the urbanregional landscape should be conceived as infrastructure (see Figure 7.3). The main
FIGURE 7.3 Transporting Conlumbus: A Proposal for a Contemporary Transportation Node in Columbus, Ohio (3-D rendering) by OPSYS, which is codirected by Miho Mazereeuw and pierre Belanger. The proposal was a competition finalist and received honorable mention for Re-Wired design Competition, American Institute of Architects, 2007. “Deawing from disurbanist precedents in the Midwest such as Frank Lloyd wright’s Broadacre City and Ludwing Hilberseimer’s Lafayette Park,” the design case study “develops a land use pattern that synthesizes mass transportation systems with the imperatives of the urban economy and of regional ecology.” (OPSYS, http://www.opsys.net/index.php?/projects/disurbanism/[accessed October 18, 2013], 2007.)
Argument is that economy and environment today have become inseparable and mutually codependent whereas, in the past, urban industrial economied were forced to contaminate and destroy the environment in service of the economy (Belanger 2009). Infrastructures that, in the past, were only engineered to support urban economies should now simultaneously support the environment. As a consequence, infrastructure, once the sole purview of the profession of civil engineering, is taking on extreme relevance for landscape planning and design practices. Belanger describes how landscape practice stands to gain momentum by widening its sphere of intervention to include the operative and logistical aspects of urbanization and talk of new paradigms of longevity and performance, which decisively break with the Old World pictorial, bucolic, and aesthetic tradition of landscape design (Belanger 2009).
Another North American landscape scholar to promote landscape as infrastructure is Gary Strang, who has formulated similar thoughts about the relationship between infrastructure and the contemporary landscape. With reference to Marx’s description of “the machine in the garden,” Strang observes that current conditions create a situation in which the machine becomes inseparable from the garden or in which the garden and the machine are completely intertwined (Strang 1996). In doing so, Strang does not refer to the formal characteristics but to the functional integration between infrastructure and a constructed landscape, which relies on infrastructure for its preservation. In seeing infrastructure as landscape, Strang argued for The Garden and the Machine
An approach that allows the natural landscape and the landscape of infrastructure, which occupy the same space, to coexist and preform multiple functions. He would like architects to be more like farmers who depend on the architecture of natural systems for their livelihood (Strang 1996).